For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Tuesday, 27 September 2011

Module Handbooks

At Columbia University on the Upper West Side of New York, the entering history student was faced with the Historiography course (History g6000x) taught by Peter Gay, the brilliant historian of the bourgeoisie. He compared us as captives. Our problems, as students, he wrote in a brochure for each of us, were Laziness and Stupidity. ‘You are joining a profession in which competition is tough, and life is hard’. ‘In the months to come’, he warned, ‘you will hear, and perhaps tell, stories of injustice and neglect, but it might just be that not all of these stories are true.’